Linkety-link, part 14

Here are some links to random fibery things I found of interest. (If you follow me on Pinterest, you’ll have seen these already.) It’s probably also a good place to ask me any questions you might have.

Knitting

• Mosaic knitting pattern generator
• Stitch pattern calculator (that is, given gauge and a particular width, this will calculate how many repeats can be used).
• How many stitches will fit on a given circular needle (chart includes different lengths of needles and different thicknesses of yarn).

Weaving:

• Planned pooling with handpainted yarn meant for knitting.
• Cavandoli knots, to be used instead of hemstitching.
• How to warp two heddles on a rigid heddle loom

Linkety-link, part 11

Something I learned from a random post that came across my Pinterest feed:

Knitweaving has other names aside from knitweaving and inlay. It’s also called “woven knitting” (no surprise), as well as Estonian Inlay and Roositud. Both of the latter refer to the traditional use of it in Estonia, where it is used to form vertical bands of pattern in accessories like socks and mittens. There’s a clever way of making the woven yarn go back and forth while the knitting is worked in the round. It’s shown in this video:

I’ve collected all the patterns listed for the technique on Ravelry in this bundle, because there’s not enough patterns there yet to make it worth requesting a new attribute.

Now for the usual sporadic list of links:
(If you follow me on Pinterest, you’ll have seen these already.)

Knitting:

• Unholy heel: another way of doing a short-row heel without wrap-and-turn.

(Detailed instructions are for a knitting machine, but the principle holds: knit together the two stitches that are on either side of the gap, then increase a stitch.)

• Homemade knitting thimble, for those who like to do their stranded knitting with both yarns held in the left hand.
• Chinese Waitress cast-on with crochet hook.
• Clever things you can do with purled i-cords.
• Hatch Stitch Edge makes a fancy, tidy selvedge.
• Long tail cross over cast-on.
• Twisted decreases for use with traveling stitches.

Weaving:

• Working with a stationary warping paddle.
• Warping a loom directly from a warping board.
• Patterned bands with a two-hole rigid heddle.
• Using a homemade nail loom.
• Deflected warp on four shafts.

Mending:

• Darning with conspicuous and attractive patterns. Plaid!
• Visible mending.

Miscellaneous:

• Lazy joins for nalbinding.
• a method for making a tidy loop at the top of a friendship bracelet.
• Making and reading patterns for friendship bracelets.
• Dealing with ease in sewing patterns.
• Making patterns from finished clothes.

P.S. I’ve had one suggestion on Patreon for a word to encode as a stitch pattern for September. If you’d like to suggest a different word, please support me on Patreon by the fifteenth of this month and comment on my activity page. I’ll do a randomized choice if you do. Or you could suggest a word by September 15…

Random fiber arts links, part 3

Random links. I’m going to be using my sewing machine again soon. Can you tell?

I’m afraid the extent of my interesting crochet links this week involves using a crochet hook to decorate knitting. I’m very much in favor of combining the two. 🙂

Make easy plaid (or vertical lines) on your knitting with a crochet hook and chain stitch.

Sew these ribbon holders, useful for headbands, or, you know, circular hooks or needles.

Sewing darts with a single thread in both sewing machine bobbin and needle. I must try this; human ingenuity is immense.

Popsicle stick rigid heddle looms for use with a simple backstrap loom setup.

Sewing narrow hems on the sewing machine.

Not dead yet

Hey look, I made something! Well, several somethings, only I haven’t posted about them either. Oops.

Anyway, here, look, I made a bag to hang from my loom and keep tools in!

Oh, didn’t I tell you? I got a loom! I had one before, but I’d gotten it for free and it turned out to be too badly cracked. I bought a loom from someone I know from online, and swapped the pieces of the other one (as spare parts) to her for some nice heddles to use with it. (The heddles are the things you run warp threads through; when the heddles go up and down, so do the warp threads, making it easier to weave.)

Here’s my new-to-me loom in an earlier stage of being fixed up.

I’ve done some work on her since I took that picture: wiping everything down with diluted Murphy’s oil soap, rubbing in some Wood Beams, getting the rust off with wire brush and naval jelly, moving the treadles around to the back where they started out, and replacing the rusty and pitted lower warp beam. I have a little rod stock on order to replace a rod in one of the harnesses. Finding metric rod stock in small quantities in the US is hard to do. I wish I could say I was surprised. After that, the only thing I need is tie up cord. I’m waiting until I can afford the fancy TexSolv tie up cord, because I gather it’s worth its cost.

And then I can start warping the loom (putting the warp threads on) and get to weaving.

She’s a Lillstina 46″ floor loom (means I can theoretically weave 46″ wide fabric on her)—a counterbalance—and her name is Diamond Lil.

Other bits I already have that I’m going to need: a tall chair that I hope is the right height, a warping board, shuttles and bobbins, and lease sticks.

Backstrap-woven bag

Over a year ago, I used a backstrap loom to weave two strips of fabric from some cotton/wool/nylon sock yarn:

Then I washed the strips and sewed them together by hand to make one bigger strip.

Then I had to dig out my sewing room enough to be able to get at the sewing machine, at which point I added a zipper and side seams to make a finished bag:

It’s nice to finish something.

Minor pleasures

I was fixing some errors in the way I threaded my table loom (I skipped dents while sleying the reed), when I discovered to my delight that because my table loom only has two shafts, I can sley the reed and thread the heddles at the same time. (This means extra care, but does save me time.)

Lemonade

This was an exercise in making lemonade from lemons!

I had some grey Coopworth combed top, which I handpainted. Unfortunately, I was (and am) still pretty new to dyeing, and the fiber got somewhat felted.

So I pulled it apart into color chunks, and combed the different sections to produce a very little bit of combed top which was lovely to spin up into a small quantity of semi-worsted 3-ply using a spindle.

Because the fiber had been felted, there was a lot of combing waste. I needed something to practice wheel spinning with (because I had some fiber I wanted to spin on a wheel for the Tour de Fleece), so I drum carded the waste, knowing full well that I’d end up with lumpy-bumpy thick and thin yarn. Which I did, and then I plied it with some very thin bouclé that my friend had. I liked it, but it was bulkier than I usually like to use, and besides, it wasn’t really quite my style.

So I decided that the two yarns put together would make a project, and bethought myself of using a backstrap loom for the purpose. Now, I’ve put together another backstrap, but haven’t finished the project. Also, it’s been over 20 years since I did any serious weaving.

I am therefore pretty damn pleased with the result! It’s a fairly consistent width and the selvedges are not tooblobby.

Persephone photos

I borrowed a camera from a friend, and so here are some pictures of Persephone!

Persephone

Edited slightly from a post I made on Ravelry on 8/17/2009:

So I was driving up the street this morning when I noticed a jumble of wood boards and stuff on someone’s curb (where people leave stuff when they are willing to let people just take it away). I drove half a block further when the nature of some of it sunk in and I screeched to a halt.

Two minutes later I had a trunk full of two warping boards (one of which doubles as an inkle loom) and was inspecting a rather dilapidated old floor loom.

Five minutes later I was walking downhill holding T’s hand while the guy who had put his mother’s old loom out carried the loom down to my house.

I have to inspect it more closely and it clearly needs a lot of loving care – a good wipe down, oil, new belts, new cord to hold some of the bits on, and who knows what all. I hope it can be put back in working order and that I can find somewhere to put it in my house.

If I can’t make it fit I bet I can find someone who’d love it…

eeeee!

More details:

It’s a 22” four-harness, four-treadle floor loom from Harrisville Designs. I think it was stored upside down on a wood floor. I think many of the metal bits (the reed and some of the rods) are going to need replacing due to rust. Some of the heddles are rusty too. It needs new belts (or whatever they are) so the harnesses will go up and down. The manual and the parts catalog are going to be My Friends, and fortunately, they arrived in the mail yesterday.

It’s going to be a slow process getting her back in order.

She’s named Persephone.